When members of Southern California’s logistics community met in Pomona on Thursday, they rallied around the idea that a career in warehousing can be fulfilling, even exciting.

“There’s no better place to learn how to deal with people, to see the actual outcome, have a number and the end of the day and know that you’ve won, or that you need to improve,” said Jackie Underberg, director of operations for Amazon Fulfillment in San Bernardino.

She was one of the speakers at the daylong Southern California Logistics and Supply Chain Summit. It was hosted by the Center for Supply Chain & Logistics at Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker School of Management and the Inland Empire Economic Partnership.

The summit attracted 300 people from industry, government and education.

The topic of warehouse job quality matters to the Inland area because Riverside and San Bernardino counties have a high concentration of workers in the logistics sector. The Bureau of Labor Statistics preliminary average hourly earnings for all employees in the warehousing and storage subsector was $18.60 for March 2015.

Approximately $1 trillion worth of merchandise flows through Southern California, most from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach inland to the Midwest, Drucker School dean Larry Crosby said in his welcoming remarks.

Speakers called for unity among the various sectors in the supply chain to overcome what they called biases and a lack of support from the electorate, a perception that “freight doesn’t vote.”

Critics say logistics jobs are repetitious and uncreative, that wages are low and that companies rely too heavily on temporary employment.

“It’s not what most people think it is,” said B.J. Patterson, president and CEO of Pacific Mountain Logistics in Ontario, in his opening remarks. “I can remember the first time I was asked to go into a warehouse. I said, ‘A warehouse. Are you crazy? They’ve got trucks and diesel and stuff.’ It’s not that anymore. It’s nothing like that. It moves at the speed of light. It’s highly automated … Our electorate doesn’t know that. They like to attack us, they like to go after us and they don’t understand what they’re doing. …

“I know we like to cuss them out when they cut us off on the freeway, right? But at the end of the day, without trucks we’d be sitting here naked without tablecloths on the tables.”

Automation of warehouses has created opportunties for supply chain technicians, said Colleen Molko, interim associate dean and career and technical education project director of the National Center for Supply Chain Technology Education in Norco.

“What we’ve heard from company after company is not only is there a lack of technicians to hire, but the technicians that they do hire don’t have the skills that they need for automation,” she said. “For distribution centers and automated warehouses, what that means is time down. And time down is money.

“The other thing that we hear a lot is the absence of soft skills … knowing how to interact, work as a team.”

Underberg said Amazon hires a range of people, from high school graduates to MBAs, and is always looking for talent. In addition to technical skills, it values people skills and the ability to work in teams.

Teamwork was the theme of summit keynote speaker Randy Lewis, retired senior vice president of Walgreens logistics and supply chain, who talked about his initiative to integrate handicapped people into the workforce at the company’s distribution centers, including one in Moreno Valley.

Employees included people with Asperger’s syndrome and autism, most of whom had never been hired before, who were motivated by acceptance they found in the workplace.

He said a woman with Down syndrome became one of the company’s best human resources staff members.

“We didn’t find a single disability that we would automatically exclude. … And we got some great employees.”

Fielding Buck has been a business reporter since 2014 with a focus on logistics, supply chain and GIS. Prior experience includes extensive entertainment reporting. He loves photography and dogs and lives in San Bernardino County.